The McKelvy House Scholars invite you to join their weekly Sunday evening discussion at 4 p.m. Email the group for the Zoom link. A discussion on “Can Machines Think?” will be led by Weizhou Ding ’23, who provides the background below.
The large number of spam emails and the amazing work that robots do to pretend to be humans create a lot of inconveniences. The shocking fact is 97% of daily emails all over the world are spam emails, and the energy to create them would be sufficient for a small country like Ireland.
Many online custom services are no longer a list of options for problems anymore. Instead, we now have a chatbox that can simulate the communication process as if we are talking to a real person.
With the fast development of computer science, we are facing the question, “Can machines think?” right in front of us. The Turing Test was almost broken in 2008, and more and more artificial intelligence is appearing in our life. So, as people who are very likely going to live with robots and “intelligent” androids, I would like us to have a discussion of “Can Machines Think?” this weekend.
Background/preparation
1: Have a conversation with robot Elbot, which almost broke the Turing Test in 2008.
2: Have fun with poems written by robots. Does it contradict the idea that machines are not creative?
3: Watch this short video.
4: Read the paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by Alan Turing. Please pay more attention to the part “Contrary Views on the Main Question.”